click on images for title and larger view   An installation of photographs at Sydney International Airport   Strange to look back on the enormous landscape we have struggled across all these weeks, across the sea ... across my childhood, to observe how clearly the footprints lead to this place and no other. David Malouf, AN IMAGINARY LIFE, Chatto & Windus Sydney Airports Corporation Ltd has commissioned a series of photographs reflecting the vibrancy of Sydney's multicultural identity. Situated next to the arrivals area of the International Terminal, Welcome to Sydney is presented in large scale lightboxes. The images portray migrants from various, distinct areas of Sydney. As Director of Commercial Services Coralie Kelly comments, " the art works introduce fresh images of Australians to Sydney Airport's arrivals area; they awaken a sense of the city's complex and diverse composition of different cultures". They include nationalities which have a long association with migration to Australia, such as the Chinese and Italians, as well as more recent communities including the Vietnamese and South African. The portraits represent residents of Sydney from different cultural backgrounds. A selection of the images is presented in large-scale lightboxes that line a corridor leading from the International Terminal's arrivals area. The corridor is used regularly by tour groups, including many non-English speaking visitors, and so the portraits with their multi-lingual versions of Welcome to Sydney create a perfect threshold with the city. At the corridor's conclusion a dramatic wall set into the architecture of a bus shelter are composed of further twelve works which convey the harmony and contrasts of the city's multicultural communities. The individuals and families who appear in the photographs were invited by Zahalka to include an object that represents a personal or cultural association of their homeland. The objects include a tea urn from Russia, a traditional hat from Vietnam, family jewellery from Afghanistan, and 'token money ' from China which promises to bring prosperity in the new country. By contrast, the locations chosen for the images reflect aspects of their new life in Sydney. They form a panoramic tour around Sydney, including its suburbs, beaches, parks and central business district, depicting both familiar and unfamiliar sites. The images play with different pictorial conventions, ranging from oil painting and cinema to touristic postcards. The panoramic format of the images seems to combine the expansive, generous quality of the Australian landscape with the sense of isolation and uneasiness experienced in migrating to a strange place. She adapts the conventions of official portraiture reserved for European nobility, and portrays her subjects in full-length, often in formal costume and in command of the surrounding landscape. Her images, however, exchange the emblems of status for those of personal meaning; they replace the mood of inherited privilege with an atmosphere that suggests uncertainty, and the portraits become studies in the individuals' inherent nobility. The images invite consideration of the stereotypes of national identity. While Bondi Beach is commonly associated with the idea of suntanned lifesavers, Zahalka's portrait of Rabbi Mendel Kastel and his family on the beach remind us that area is also home to a large Jewish community. Her portraits also capture the intricate layers of SydneyÕs history. The Chinese gardener, Guangan Wu, is pictured in the market gardens adjoining the runways of Sydney Airport as a jet approaches for landing. Like Sydney itself, the gardens have been cultivated over two centuries by different ethnic groups, varying from the Irish and Cornish to the Chinese. Welcome to Sydney recalls aspects of the history of migration to the city. It also embodies the various moods and temperaments of the contemporary city, and forms a perfect threshold between the Airport Ôs arrivals area and Sydney. Location: Sydney International Airport Terminal, Northern Arrivals Exit / Arrivals Curator: John Murphy